It's What Is On the Inside That Counts

So, in keeping in the theme of my last post, I thought I would revisit the fun aspect of our collection of donated books. Yes, there a lot of frustrations when it comes to having a collection made up entirely of donations, including the sustainability aspect.

But there are also some fun surprises. Namely, what we sometimes find inside. I find endless amusement from inscriptions, old 'bookmarks', and other random things we find inside these old books as we catalog them. They tell such interesting stories about their previous owners and lives. Before I went to library school I worked as the Acquisitions Coordinator at a college library in Chicago. I loved that job because I got to open up boxes of brand new books almost every day. But I've found that opening old books every day can be just as interesting and fun.

This week's examples:

Found in an old book...I love the record of
a previous library's policies!

This was found in the very back of a book. If you stole
a book would you document where you got it?

Not sure what vegetarians have to do with joy...I looked
through the entire book but found no other notes about
joy or vegetarians.

To Keep or Not To Keep

Last year, soon after I started at RTC, I helped weed and sort through a huge collection of donated books. It was an interesting [read: frustrating] process. I wrote a short list to friends in the US about making donations...reminding us all to make relevant donations.

Because almost the entire RTC Library collection is made up of donated books, I've spent a lot of time thinking about donations and how they play into collection development. Like many LIS graduate students, I took a Collection Development (CD) class when I was in grad school. I remember thinking a lot of the class was a bit common sense. But it was helpful to think about a collection of books and think about how you would build, weed or grow a collection in a library.

I know, all you non-librarians are thinking 'Seriously? You take classes in how to pick out books?' Yes. Yes, we do. Since libraries are community-based, collection development is lot more complicated than going to Amazon and picking out bestsellers. It's about picking the best resources for your community of users so that they are connected to the best information for their needs.

At any rate, it's been interesting to approach CD with only donated books. For example, when you make your acquisitions selections from a pile of unknown, donated books you have to be extremely creative. I've discovered that in order to add new books to the collection, I can't think I want book X. Instead, I think: I want subject X. I have to think in broad terms about the types of books needed. What subjects are we lacking in? Of course, since only 2/3 of the collection is cataloged, it can be hard to tell what's still needed, but that's another story.

Also, because new books are hard to come by, weeding takes on a whole new meaning. Every library has [or should have] a policy on when to *gasp* get rid of books. But I honestly struggle to weed here. Because if I weed out one book the chances of it ever being replaced are slim to none.

So my question becomes: Is it better to have mediocre or out-of-date information or no information at all?

And sometimes I just don't know.

The truth is a lot of what's in the library would probably never pass a weeding inspection in a similar, American library. But I'm not in America. I'm in Uganda. And my options are much more limited. It's an interesting dilemma and has stretched me in a lot of ways to think about collections in new ways. I don't have an answer. Maybe we need to revise our policies so we can make things more clear about what to keep or not.

But being the big-picture thinker that I am, the issue is not just about policies. The issue is about donations from other countries and how goods travel across the globe. It's about educating the administration on the importance of getting new books. It's about soliciting for books and materials we actually need. It's about how to get relevant materials to developing countries cheaper.

And, I guess it really just gets back to the basic question:

How do you build and maintain a library's collection so that it remains relevant to its users?

Treasures

As I've mentioned before, the majority of books in our collection have come from donations. Many from churches and Christian groups in the US as far as I can tell. We have some great books...earlier this past year we found a fantastic (read: huge!) dictionary in our donation pile, which is used daily. We also found a set of almost new commentaries. Donated things are always interesting because they include a combination of treasure and junk. And sometimes it's hard to know which is which.

As we've been cataloging we are going through the collection book by book. And I have found a number of books that I find hilarious. I suppose in the right collection and at the right time, these particular books are not actually that funny. But I just couldn't help being amused by this recent find in our Church History section:

Interesting because this was actually given directly to
a church here in Kampala... I keep wondering how it
 ended up at RTC

Yes, that's right. Making Puppets Come Alive

"This book deals almost exclusively with hand puppets."

Puppets!

Ways to hold your puppet

This book prefers the 'Modern Method'.

The Modern Method

After explaining the basics of holding puppets, the book continues by giving lots of tips. How to make sure the Puppets are the correct heights, how to use puppets and props, suggested pantomime stories, and even how to practice voices:

Incorrect height in relation to each other.

Correct heights

How to make your puppet 'look around'.

Example picture of looking

Pantomime skit

Example of Pantomime 1

 

Example of Pantomime 2

"The Puppet's voice should match his size"

I seriously mean no disrespect toward people who do puppet-y things. I'm sure this book was originally geared toward church groups who put on puppets for kids and Sunday School. If anything this book gives me a lot of respect for the team that brought you Mister Roger's Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I just found this book such an interesting combination of funny, endearing, creepy, and interesting. It struck me as particularly interesting because finding materials to make puppets like these here would be particularly challenging and possibly expensive. 

But I suppose the reason I found it most amusing was because it was in our (pre-cataloged) Church History section. Puppet show about Martin Luther, anyone?

This Week's Project

Remember all those books I sorted back in January? That was a crazy week...Joshua and I sorted through hundreds of books to find if any were relevant for the library. It was fun to find a few 'treasures' (a huge dictionary!!) but it was also heartbreaking. In hundreds of boxes we only kept about 10 boxes of books. I saw firsthand the frustration that comes with donations that are irrelevant, out of date, falling apart, etc. It's the frustration that comes with being given other people's old stuff. And I'm not saying any of those books were particularly bad, just not what a theological college library needs.

Anyway, after we sorted out all those books I was told at some point the college wanted to have a book sale. I had a professor in graduate school who told us to avoid organizing book sales...he told us they are a lot of work and it's ok to let library friends' groups organize them. He warned us. So with that in the back of my mind and the common sense that said I do NOT want to sort those books again, I've been avoiding the book sale all year.

But as things go, this week I could avoid it no longer. I was told on Monday that the administration wanted to have the book sale this week. So Joshua and I geared ourselves up for a busy week. We announced the sale to students, we printed signs, got help resorting books, organized books, moved books, arranged books, etc. Basically, I've slept quite well all week from the extra exercise! :)

Books ready for selling!

So glad there were shelves in our 'store'!

Everyone loves a bargain, right? :)

By Thursday (our first day of the sale) the students were stopping me regularly to ask what books we would sell and if I could help them find some good ones. Or if I would set some aside for them. I told them to just come look. We placed several boxes of magazines outside our 'store' (i.e. empty storage room now filled with books for sale) and as we headed toward it on Thursday just before the sale began, we were greeted with this sight of students looking at the magazines:

(Personally, I love the student with the box on his head :))

Looking at free magazines outside!

And with that we knew we were in for a busy afternoon. Once the sale began...it was chaotic! Exciting but a bit crazy. Students were all over and Joshua were trying to keep up with everything.

Joshua took this by standing on a chair...I love the chaos it captures!

Helping students organize their purchases

And for almost three solid hours that was what we did. Kept track of purchases, answered questions, moved books, helped find books, argued with students that we were not a market open for bargaining, etc. And by the time the students began clearing out, we had a room that looked like this:

Today's sale was MUCH more calm. Still busy but not so crazy. With fewer students we were able to help them individually a bit more, which was nice. We always had customers but never more 7 or 8 at a time.

Day Two!

And, actually, I've learned a lot the past couple days. Because even though I thought the donated books were a bit silly and no one would want them, the truth really is you can't judge a book by its cover. Because those students bought lots of books! Before the sale some of the administration wanted us to price the books based on content, but I told them I couldn't do that because what's important to one person isn't necessarily important to another. And it's true. There are a number of books I thought 'No one will want this' but sure enough, many of them were bought the first day. I mean, if you think about it, in the US we have tons and tons of books at our fingertips. But here, for many of these students, this is there chance to build a personal library. And, really, it was scenes like these that make the chaos and craziness all worth it:

This student was amazing...came with a list of the
categories of books he wanted and went through
book by book to find one in each category.

For those of you still looking at these pictures, I'll finish with my favorite scene from the day. Sometime during the craziness I found a few of the kids that live on the compound trying to sneak away with one of our boxes of magazines that was sitting outside, free for the taking. I had told them earlier they could each have a 'book' but caught them doing this. They were so cute I couldn't be mad. :)